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Essentially the Lt. Col. Raja Chari who is the director of the F-35 integrated test force and commander of the 461st flight test squadron said that the A-10 is better than the F-35 for CAS in uncontested airspace but that the F-35 can be just as effective if it gets refueled during its CAS mission because it can only loiter for 30 minutes whereas the A-10 can loiter for 90 minutes.

In a contested environement Lt. Col. Raja Chari says that you can only send an A-10 into contested air space for only one mission (Basically it will not survive the mission) whereas the F-35 can operate in that kind of environment.

(CNN)Can an old war horse that dates back more than 40 years hold its own against the newest warbird loaded with the latest in technology and weaponry?

The Pentagon said it aims to find out and will pit the venerable A-10 Warthog against the F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter in a series of rigorous tests replicating what the planes would face in battle.
"We are going to do a comparative test of the ability of the F-35 to perform close air support, combat search-and-rescue missions and related missions with the A-10," Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation, told a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing on Tuesday.

"The F-35 will not do close air support mission the same way the A-10 does. It will do it very differently. The A-10 was designed to be low, and slow, and close to the targets it was engaging, relatively speaking," Frank Kendall III, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, told the Senate panel Tuesday. "We will not use the F-35 in the same way as the A-10.."

"We're going to let the F-35 pilots take advantage of the systems on that aircraft ... and see how well the missions are carried out in terms of the ability to strike targets in a timely manner and accurately, and then report on that," Gilmore said.